Paul Meier reading
Commuting Past the 'Hood
by Alan Harris
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The 'hood is the 'hood is the 'hood, where a throb in the heart can keep time, keep time with a sturdy song too blue for the too too. |
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Through the train window I notice inhabited shells south of the tracks-- hollow-windowed, mottle-roofed homes. Open-hooded engineless cars rust under giant cottonwoods littering broken sidewalks leading to front doors opening into TVs never not on. Perhaps some brutal mothers feel free to batter TV-addled children in these houses, loose cages to be escaped for safety in the streets. Perhaps some fathers are secrets or stray away or land jobs in fall-apart factories for just enough cash to prolong starvation. Within this silver train suburbanites glide safely past the 'hood with eyes in newspapers or closed in sleeping bliss, unaware and uncaring that south of these tracks might thrive a rugged richness not understood by well-fed hardwood-floor owners accustomed to gourmet coffee. Further on, west of the city, suburban houses appear all slick and pretty as polished pain, some of them transmitting false alarms to uncaring cops, some of them serving as highly mortgaged coffins for lives deceased at the roots. Hand-to-mouth 'hood dwellers grapple and make do and laugh, clutch most any prize and die, few of them ever aspiring to climb a dollar ladder or pass away like moneyed mortals, trusts all set up, who shatter as richly as a falling chandelier. |
From the book Heartclips (1996)
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(Paul Meier)
(Alan Harris)
by Alan Harris. All rights reserved.